Durga Prasad, an 80-year-old farmer, was resting in the shade of a tree in front of his home when the party workers arrived. An app on their smartphones instantly told them who Prasad was, who he might vote for — and why he should thank Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“You pay in installments of 2,000 rupees, right?” a local official from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, asked. Prasad, who gets $72 a year through a farmer welfare program that Modi started and promoted, agreed.
“Do you have rations?” the officer asked, even though he already knew the answer. He had made his point.
Such subsidies are one of Modi’s most notable features of his mass appeal. India’s new airports, diplomatic prestige and booming stock market may seem like Modi’s calling cards, but for the 95% of Indians whose incomes are too low to file income taxes, the subsidies in small amounts of cash and household goods are more important. Modi’s party is organized to make full use of them in national elections that end early next month.
India’s welfare programs are wide-ranging and extensive. Under the largest welfare program, 821 million Indians are entitled to 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of free rice or wheat each month. The government began handing out food early in the pandemic to prevent famine and has since invested $142 billion in the program. Modi’s face began appearing on the bags in January.
Another program, named after the prime minister, has helped build 15 million homes since 2015, at a cost of $3 billion a year; home improvements and extensions are also included. The government has also covered the cost of millions of toilets and is working to provide piped drinking water to every home.
The foundation for this expanded welfare system was laid soon after Modi became prime minister in 2014. All unbanked Indians were allowed to open bank accounts, which were also branded with the “Prime Minister’s” label, in conjunction with the universal ID card program launched by the previous government.
The accounts provide the government with valuable information about the financial health of its poorest citizens. They also open the way for “direct benefit transfers,” funds that bypass the sometimes corrupt local officials who once doled out the benefits — and appear to come from Modi himself.
These transfers Last fiscal yearBut Modi’s budget has not become profligate. That’s partly because government spending on education and health care — long-term investments — as a share of the economy has shrunk as brand-name welfare programs have proliferated. Spending on programs that guarantee jobs, which are associated with Modi’s opponents, has also fallen.
Whatever the motivation, Modi’s priority of tangible food and household subsidies has eased the pain for Indians whose economy was slowing before the pandemic, collapsing in its first year and then recovering unevenly. The Hindu nationalist government has distributed aid equally to all religious groups, even if it doesn’t get many votes from some of them.
The relief payments may be the most powerful thing Modi can point to in claiming that he has contributed to improving the lives of his fellow Indians, hundreds of millions of whom remain in desperate need of stable, well-paying jobs.
Vinod Misra, a local BJP official who recently visited Prasad in the Amethi district of Uttar Pradesh, explained that in poor areas where people used to die of hunger, “our party is particularly committed to bringing in schemes that benefit everyone.”
“What we have to do is go to that family and say, ‘Brother, who built this roof that you have?’ ” Mr. Misra said.
In a country where 80% of the population lives in rural or poor areas, people desperately want something in return for voting, said Pradeep Gupta, head of pollster Axis My India. If politicians deliver on their promises, “people will elect you again and again,” Mr. Gupta said. Everything else is “marketing.”
The BJP’s voter tracking is the culmination of its massive efforts to tap into its ideologically committed core members. Its fundsIts national organization and increasingly complex data management.
In the temple town of Pushkar, west of Amethi and within the Hindi “cow belt” that is a BJP stronghold, another local party worker explained the merits of an app called Saral. With just a few swipes, the worker, Shakti Singh Rathore, shared a bird’s-eye view of his neighbours, whom he aimed to rally around to campaign for Mr Modi.
There are 241 “polling booths” in Pushkar constituency, each with its own map boundaries. Rathore flips through the information of one of the polling booths he oversees. His target is not just the voters but also the beneficiaries, or “labharthis” – an important new term in ground campaigning.
“The names of the labharthis are listed here,” Mr. Rathore said. One man he mentioned received a cooking gas cylinder — “Here is his address, postal code and phone number.” Another man received cash from a farmer welfare scheme.
“All the data is here,” Mr. Rathore said.
Anyone can download Saral through the Apple or Google Play stores to get campaign updates, but only enlisted BJP workers can browse its database. The party’s national leadership said it has connected more than 6 million workers using Saral. They can both retrieve as well as upload data on voters and beneficiaries.
Voters don’t seem to mind, or at least aren’t surprised, that so much information about their relationship to the national government is being spread door-to-door by political operatives.
Misra said he had no idea how the personal information got into the app. Other local workers said they believed the data was provided by the government itself, given its accuracy. Amit Malviya, the BJP’s head of information technology, said at a startup conference in December that the party had manually collected 30 megabytes of data over the past 10 elections.
Saral does a lot of other things that are useful for the party’s grassroots campaigning. It tracks workers’ outreach and measures them based on their performance, in effect “gamifying” the hard work of canvassing for votes.
This also gives workers the opportunity to help voters smoothly receive benefits and eliminate the distinction between partisan politics and government work.
Mr Modi himself To the TV crew This month, he had asked party workers to collect information about voters who have not received benefits and “assure them that this is Modi’s guarantee – they will get benefits during my third term”.
Ajay Singh Gaur, a BJP worker, who was accompanying Mishra on his rounds across Amethi, ended up in a lengthy argument with farmer Dinesh Maurya, who complained that a faulty wire had fallen in his wheat field.
“All my crops were burnt and I have not received a penny in compensation,” Mr Moriah said.
Gower assured Moriah that he would pay him back the money the state owed him. “I have spoken to the people in charge of the power station. I will make it right,” he said.
Mujib Mashar Contributed reporting.
